“‘Try’ for one?”—her younger visitor took it up while her elder more attentively watched him. “That was exactly what he did try for when he pressed you so hard in vain for the great Sir Joshua.”
“Oh well, he mustn’t come back to that—must he, Theign?” her ladyship cooed.
That personage failed to reply, so that Lord John went on, unconscious apparently of the still more suspicious study to which he exposed himself. “Besides which there are no things of that magnitude knocking about, don’t you know?—they’ve got to be worked up first if they’re to reach the grand publicity of the Figure! Would you mind,” he continued to his noble monitor, “an agreement on some such basis as this?—that you shall resign yourself to the biggest equivalent you’ll squeamishly consent to take, if it’s at the same time the smallest he’ll squeamishly consent to offer; but that, that done, you shall leave him free——”
Lady Sandgate took it up straight, rounding it off, as their companion only waited. “Leave him free to talk about the sum offered and the sum taken as practically one and the same?”
“Ah, you know,” Lord John discriminated, “he doesn’t ‘talk’ so much himself—there’s really nothing blatant or crude about poor Bender. It’s the rate at which—by the very way he’s ‘fixed’: an awful way indeed, I grant you!—a perfect army of reporter-wretches, close at his heels, are always talking for him and of him.”
Lord Theign spoke hereupon at last with the air as of an impulse that had been slowly gathering force. “You talk for him, my dear chap, pretty well. You urge his case, my honour, quite as if you were assured of a commission on the job—on a fine ascending scale! Has he put you up to that proposition, eh? Do you get a handsome percentage and are you to make a good thing of it?”
The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry—whether from a good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but he otherwise showed a bold front, only bending his eyes a moment on his watch. “As he’s to come to you himself—and I don’t know why the mischief he doesn’t come!—he will answer you that graceful question.”
“Will he answer it,” Lord Theign asked, “with the veracity that the suggestion you’ve just made on his behalf represents him as so beautifully adhering to?” On which he again quite fiercely turned his back and recovered his detachment, the others giving way behind him to a blanker dismay.
Lord John, in spite of this however, pumped up a tone. “I don’t see why you should speak as if I were urging some abomination.”
“Then I’ll tell you why!”—and Lord Theign was upon him again for the purpose. “Because I had rather give the cursed thing away outright and for good and all than that it should hang out there another day in the interest of such equivocations!”